Colleges are feeling heat to prove that their students are learning. As a result, a growing number of colleges are
measuring intended “learning outcomes” as well as issuing grades. But fewer are using standardized tests than was the case a few years ago.
Those are findings of a new survey from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The liberal education organization received responses from chief academic officers at 325 of its member institutions, including community colleges and four-year institutions (public and private as well as a couple of for-profits).
Context: The past decade has witnessed a sustained emphasis on information and communication technologies (ICT) in education, coupled with the rise of online social media and increasing pervasiveness of personal media devices.
Research Question: Our research question asked: How has this changing context affected the educational experiences of American high school students?
Setting: The exploratory, qualitative study took place at two high schools in a large metropolitan district in the southeastern United States. One high school was in a downtown area, and the other was in a suburban setting.
Research Design: The researchers used various qualitative research approaches, including interviews, on-site observations, and document analysis. Our interview participants included classroom teachers and support staff as well as students drawn from across each school’s grade levels. We also shadowed 10 of the student interview participants through their entire school days.
I am a proud curmudgeon. Whatever hip new thing you’re promoting, I’m probably uninterested. Whatever buzzword
you might be enamored of, I probably hate it. And whatever bureaucratic activity you want me to engage in, I almost
certainly think it’s pointless.
Despite my complete lack of buy-in for whatever you’re into, I’m also willing to work hard for my department and students, even if that means jumping through your hoops. I have worked successfully to move policy proposals through the governance system, I’ve overseen a curriculum overhaul in my department, I’ve coordinated class schedules, and I have spearheaded a successful effort to expand the number of majors in my department. In those efforts I’ve cleared numerous bureaucratic hurdles, generated enough paperwork to chop down the Amazon rain forest, and even worked a few buzzwords into some of the paperwork.
Abstract: This article considers the evolution of e-learning and some of the factors that have shaped its implementation. It draws on research conducted in the UK from 2001 to 2008 by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
(CIPD) focusing on training and learning in corporate organisations rather than courses offered to students enrolled in educational institutions. The article argues that throughout this period there has been insufficient attention given to the way
learning takes place in organisations. It considers the emerging wave of enthusiasm for Web 2.0, concluding that successful current applications of e-learning simply use a more diverse range of tools and approaches.
Keywords: corporate e-learning; learning technology; Web 2.0; social networking; virtual worlds; Webinars; online support; ‘stuff’ and ‘stir’
I intend to never grade another paper.
At the height of my adjunct "career" teaching writing, world religions, and general humanities courses, I taught up to 12 courses a year at three different institutions in the Houston area. I juggled about 400 students a year in my courses, and each student wrote three to five papers. Do the math — that’s a lot of grading.
I worked that oxymoronic full-time adjunct load for a decade — in addition to teaching a few continuing-ed courses just for kicks and extra income. In short, I taught more students and graded more papers in a decade than most of my full-time colleagues at the same university would teach in their entire careers.
For a while, I was sort of an adjunct guru. I self-published a book called How to Survive as an Adjunct Lecturer: An ntrepreneurial Strategy Manual and ended up writing a monthly advice column on The Adjunct Track for The Chronicle. I also provided coaching to other non-tenure-track instructors to help them figure out ways to work the system and squeeze as much money out of it as possible. The idea was to come as close as they could to an income that honored their knowledge and credentials — or to at least not have to wait tables on nonteaching days to make ends meet.
I did well financially. I made my mortgage every month and managed to save a little. But I shoveled my share of hate mail from people who said I was justifying an exploitative system when, really, all I was trying to do was find a way to survive (maybe even thrive for a few moments) within it.
Background: Much research has sought to investigate emotions and forms of emotion management among teachers worldwide, including the connection between educational change and teacher emotion; the association between the culture of teaching and teachers’ emotional experience within parentteacher interactions; the link between teacher emotion and teacher beliefs; and the
expressions and sources of a wide variety of emotions in teaching.
Ah, frosh. The gateway to all the parties university has to offer. It’s a fleeting moment filled with hype and rush. It’s hot and filled with sweaty people experiencing the same things you are.
My frosh happened two years ago and it was anything but dull. However, I remember feeling a tad vulnerable. There was a little voice in my head that kept nagging about how I decided to dress for the week. Don’t bend too much or else your butt will show. Your dress is a little too revealing.
My fellow freshman girls and I wore short shorts during the day. At night, we wore tight dresses or much more revealing tops as we danced the night away. Our fashion made us out as bait to concupiscent freshman boys—those who cannot control their hands from reaching down my thighs or grinding against my body without my permission. It opened my eyes to the on-going battle between what is deemed as “provocative”—and the perceived correlation between fashion and consent.
I’ve been especially appreciative of my colleagues this week and there are lots of reasons why.
My colleagues teach me.
My colleagues let me teach them.
My colleagues disagree with me.
In the minds of students and the general public, the primary activity of a university is the pursuit of learning: a place where teachers teach, and students learn. It seems obvious that the core mission of the university is the transmission of knowledge, and in the popular imagination, simply placing bright eager minds in close proximity to leading professors will enable this alchemical process to happen. However, the reality of the practice and place of learning in today’s university is much more complicated.
Presidential terminations and resignations are nothing new, even in the staid world of academia. Yet, rarely have they played out in so public a manner as the abrupt departure of president Arvind Gupta at the University of British Columbia in the summer of 2015 or the messy dismissal of Ilene Busch-Vishniac as president of the University of Saskatchewan a year earlier. Quebec had its own drama in May 2015, with the resignation of Nadia Ghazzali, rector at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, following a critical report by Quebec’s auditor general. All three leaders left before completing their first mandates.
Amidst the turmoil, Peter Stoicheff was named the 11th president of U of S, a position he took up in late October 2015. A former English professor and a classical guitar composer with two recordings to his name, Dr. Stoicheff had served as dean of the college of arts and science at U of S for four years and knew the internal workings of the institution and its culture well. But there was a lot he didn’t know, he readily admits, and that weighed on him.
Mindfulness has received significant attention in the empirical literature during the past decade, but few studies have focused on mindfulness in university students and how it may influence problematic behaviours. This study examined the relationships among mindfulness, coping, and physiological reactivity in a sample of university students. Participants completed questionnaires, and skin conductance measurements were collected during an interview where they recalled a personally stressful event. Correlation analyses tested relationships among these variables. There was a negative correlation between substance use and mindfulness. Specifically, those using substances as a coping mechanism were less likely to be mindful and displayed higher physiological reactivity. More mindful individuals were less likely to report misusing substances and were able to calm themselves more quickly than their counterparts following a stressful event. Thus, poor outcomes for distressed students may be reduced with mindfulness-based interventions
Résumé
Au cours des dernières décennies, la pleine conscience a été l’objet d’une attention importante dans la documentation empirique, mais peu d’études ont ciblé la pleine conscience chez les étudiants et sa façon d’influencer les comportements problématiques. Cette étude a étudié l’association entre la pleine conscience, les mécanismes d’adaptation et la réactivité physiologique chez un échantillon d’étudiants. En plus de répondre à des questionnaires, les participants ont dû passer une entrevue où il leur fallait raconter un souvenir personnel particulièrement stressant pendant qu’on mesurait leur conductance cutanée. Des analyses de corrélation ont évalué les liens entre ces variables. Ainsi, on a dénoté une corrélation négative entre l’utilisation de substances nocives et la pleine conscience. Plus précisément, les participants qui avaient consommé des substances nocives comme mécanisme d’adaptation avaient moins tendance à posséder des traits conscients, et ont démontré une réactivité physiologique plus élevée que les autres étudiants. Les gens plus pleinement conscients avaient moins tendance à utiliser des substances nocives, et étaient capables de se calmer plus rapidement que leurs pairs après un événement stressant. Par conséquent, des interventions basées sur la pleine conscience pourraient aider les étudiants stressés à ne pas adopter de comportements problématiques.
In the past fifteen years, there has been a shift in the way researchers have conceptualized identity, moving from the “identity-as-thing” to an under-standing of “identity-in-practice” (Leander, 2002, 198–199). This is not necessarily a new concept, as earlier researchers recognized sociocultural influences on perception (Bartlett, 1932/1995; Vygotsky, 1978) and on the performative nature of identity (Butler, 1990; Goffman, 1959). New Literacy Studies theorists (Barton, 1994, 2001; Gee, 1996, 2000; Street 1995, 1999) began to examine identity-in-practice in relation to literacy. In addition, ethnographic accounts (Heath, 1983; Purcell-Gates, 1997; Taylor, 1983; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988) began to document ways that literacies and identities were interconnected. There was an epistemolog-ical shift, underscoring the individual and community practices that help to shape one’s identity. Literacies included all activities inside and out-side school, highlighting the relationship between people’s literacy prac-tices and their situated actions, behaviors, beliefs, and values, or their Discourses (Gee, 1999, 2008, 2011).
This article outlines a framework of creativity based on functional neuroanatomy. Recent advances in the field of cognitive neuroscience have identified distinct brain circuits that are involved in specific higher brain functions. To date, these findings have not been applied to research on creativity. It is pro- posed that there are four basic types of creative insights, each mediated by a distinctive neural circuit. By definition, creative insights occur in consciousness. Given the view that the working memory buffer of the prefrontal cortex holds the content of consciousness, each of the four distinctive neural loops terminates there. When creativity is the result of deliberate control, as opposed to spontaneous gener- ation, the prefrontal cortex also instigates the creative process. Both processing modes, deliberate and spontaneous, can guide neural
computation in structures that contribute emotional content and in structures that provide cognitive analysis, yielding the four basic types of creativity. Supportive evi- dence from psychological, cognitive, and neuroscientific studies is presented and integrated in this article. The new theoretical framework systematizes the interaction between knowledge and creative
thinking, and how the nature of this relationship changes as a function of domain and age.
Implications for the arts and sciences are briefly discussed.
A meta-analysis of 45 studies of transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership styles found that female leaders were more transformational than male leaders and also engaged in more of the contingent reward behaviors that are a component of transactional leadership. Male leaders were generally more likely to manifest the other aspects of transactional leadership (active and passive management by exception) and laissez-faire leadership. Although these differences between male and female leaders were small, the implications of these findings are encouraging for female leadership because other research has established that all of the aspects of leadership style on which women exceeded men relate positively to leaders’ effectiveness whereas all of the aspects on
which men exceeded women have negative or null relations to effectiveness.
aculty dread the grade appeal; anxiety prevails until the whole process is complete. Much has been written about ow to avoid such instances, but the potentially subjective assessments of written essays or clinical skills can be specially troublesome. One common cause of grade appeals is grading ambiguity in which the student and faculty ember disagree on the interpretation of required content. Another cause is inequity, whereby the student feels thers may have gotten more credit for very similar work or content (Hummel 2010). In the health-care field specially, these disagreements over clinical-skills assessments can actually result in student dismissal from the program and may lead to lawsuits.
A Q&A with Peter Cornish of Memorial University on the Stepped Care model, which he hopes will get everyone on campus to be part of the support system for those dealing with mental health issues.
In 2014, Peter Cornish helped the Student Wellness and Counselling Centre at Memorial University launch the Stepped
Care program. With this model, the level of intensity of care is matched to the complexity of the condition. When someone
says they are stressed, or they are not feeling happy, then society tends to say, “Okay, go see a psychologist,” said Dr.
Cornish, who is director of the counselling centre. However, not everyone needs to see a therapist all of the time. The Stepped
Care model brings in many other “low intensity” options for the patient that are readily available in the community, but which
we’re often not making use of. University Affairs sat down with Dr. Cornish to find out more about the Stepped Care model and
why universities should consider it.
Enrolments in Canadian public postsecondary institutions (colleges and universities) totalled more than 2 million in the 2014/2015 academic year, edging up 0.3% from the previous year.
This paper will examine college to university transfer in Ontario. In doing so it will discuss the structure of higher education in Ontario; present the benefits and challenges of college to university transfer; examine the current system of transfer; and explore several strategies for improving opportunities for college to university transfer. It will be argued that increasing opportunities for transfer is not only a matter of meeting increased demand but it is also a question of social justice and equality of access. Increasing college to university transfer opportunities provides an educational pipeline for underrepresented groups.
As Canadian universities seek to attract more international students, there is a need to recognize and respond to the diversity within this group and to question the binary categories of domestic students and international stu- dents. Relying primarily on 116 qualitative interviews with international undergraduates at the University of British Columbia, we utilize American students as a case study from which to explore the complex and blurred boundaries between these two categories. Americans resemble domestic stu- dents in some respects and international students in others, yet they are often less prepared to meet adaptational challenges because they have low expecta- tions of cultural and institutional differences. We compare the experiences of
Americans and international students from other countries, as well as other groups of students who fall between the cracks of the domestic and inter- national student classifications. We argue that, by targeting services on the basis of these broad administrative categories, categories that were created for financial purposes, the university reduces the take-up of the very services students need.
As the cost of college has risen, so has the number of students who are struggling to meet their basic needs. In one
recent survey, more than one in five students said they had gone hungry in the past month. Close to one in 10 said
they had been homeless at some point in the past year.
Three rising juniors describe how they made it to college despite lacking steady housing, regular meals, and the
tools to complete their high-school assignments.